The United States – the world’s largest gas consumer and producer – will account for 40% of the world’s extra gas production to 2022 thanks to the remarkable growth in its domestic shale industry. By 2022, US production will be 890 bcm, or more than a fifth of global gas output. Production from the Marcellus, one of the world’s largest fields, will increase by 45% between 2016 and 2022, even at current low price levels, as producers increase efficiency and produce more gas with fewer rigs.

While US domestic demand for gas is growing, thanks to higher consumption from the industrial sector, more than half of the production increase will be used for liquefied natural gas (LNG) for export. By 2022, the IEA estimates that the United States will be on course to challenge Australia and Qatar for global leadership among LNG exporters.

Trump — as he promised — has helped save the U.S. coal industry. Just look at what has happened to coal exports in the first quarter of 2017. They’re up 58 per cent on the same period last year, back in the dread-era of Obama — the guy who wanted to make fossil fuels so expensive that electricity would “necessarily skyrocket.”

Who is buying this stuff? People you wouldn’t necessarily expect: half of it goes to Europe which, despite the “clean energy” targets imposed on it by the EU dictatorship, evidently cannot survive on solar and bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes alone.

America has moved far beyond energy independence. It is now achieving energy dominance.

All this is, of course, very good news if you’re lucky enough to be American.

And very bad news if, like me, you’re not, because increasingly we’re going to find ourselves in a world of two halves: winners and losers.

On the winning side, there will be the half that follows the American model and embraces the cheap, abundant energy provided by fossil fuel. This includes China and India who, for all their green posturing to gullible Westerners, don’t really believe in renewables.

On the losing side, there will be the half — including, currently, Canada, Australia, Britain and most of Continental Europe — which continues to insist on making obeisance to the Climate Fairy. And which, therefore, remains wedded to the kind of renewable energy schemes which are causing the indigent to die in fuel poverty, which are ruining the industry, and which are driving up the cost of living to no practical purpose whatsoever.